Field notes

Things we keep having to explain.

Short, opinionated notes from the engineering desk. No gated whitepapers, no lead-capture forms — just the arguments we make in real meetings.

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Continuity · 6 min read

An untested backup is a rumour

Every organisation we audit has backups. Roughly a third of them have backups that would not restore. The gap between having a backup job and having a recovery capability is where most avoidable disasters live: retention windows too short to catch slow-moving ransomware, SaaS data assumed to be covered by the vendor, restore procedures that exist only in the memory of someone who left. The fix is unglamorous — immutable copies, a written recovery time objective per system, and a quarterly restore that someone signs.

More notes

Security · 5 min read

Conditional access beats password policies

Forcing quarterly password changes makes credentials weaker and support tickets heavier. Location, device compliance and risk-based sign-in rules stop far more real attacks and annoy people far less.

Cloud · 4 min read

Your Microsoft 365 bill has fat in it

Most tenants we inherit carry licences for leavers, duplicated add-ons already bundled in Business Premium, and premium tiers nobody uses. A one-hour audit routinely finds double digit percentages of waste.

Networks · 5 min read

Failover is a process, not a router

Buying a 5G backup line is the easy part. Whether phones, card terminals and door access actually follow the failover path is decided by configuration and a test you scheduled.

Budgeting · 7 min read

The true cost of the machine you kept

A five-year-old laptop costs roughly forty minutes of lost productivity a week, plus a support ticket a month. Replacement almost always wins on a spreadsheet nobody bothers to build.

Compliance · 6 min read

What auditors actually ask for

Not policies. Evidence: access reviews with dates, a breach log, supplier agreements and proof that the restore test happened. Build the evidence trail once and audits stop being events.

Support · 4 min read

Ticket volume is a design metric

If the same request appears twenty times a month, that is not workload, it is a defect. We track repeats per user and treat the top three as engineering work each quarter.

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